In this week’s episode, both storytellers face the challenge of evicting some very unwelcome guests.
Part 1: While housesitting for her uncle, JiJi Lee’s peaceful stay takes a chaotic turn when a squirrel breaks in.
JiJi Lee is a comedy writer and performer. She has contributed to The New Yorker, The New York Times, and The Onion. And her work has been published in the McSweeney's humor anthology Keep Scrolling Till You Feel Something.
Part 2: When a serious mold infestation takes over the university campus, Joshua Wilson is tasked with eliminating it.
Joshua Wilson is a Project Manager with over five years of successfully leading complex projects from start to finish. He splits my time between Boise and the Wood River Valley, where he co-founded a business providing skilled labor for high-end custom homes. He’s since managed facilities for Boise State and Northwest Nazarene University, where he championed multiple software integration projects to maximize business operations efficiency. He oversaw project management, capital planning, safety protocols, and team leadership. Now, in his junior year of a Computer Science degree at Boise State, he’s expanding his technical skills and actively seeking opportunities to apply his knowledge in software development, data analysis, and his unique background. Outside of work, he enjoys home improvement and automation projects, traveling, rafting, fishing, hunting, snowboarding, and mountain biking, often with his daughter.
EPISODE TRANSCRIPT
PART 1
A couple of years ago, my husband and I moved from Brooklyn to Silver Spring, Maryland and we were just really excited to finally have some peace and quiet and to have a dishwasher for the first time. But we quickly realized that apartments are basically the same everywhere. The walls are really thin and we can hear our neighbors play Bad Bunny at all hours. And I love Bad Bunny, but not at 2:00 in the morning.
So when our uncle asked us to house sit for him this past summer, we immediately said yes. He lives nearby, so house sitting is mostly just going over, picking up the mail, but we like to use it as an opportunity to pretend we're homeowners. He lives in this beautiful two‑story brick house, a spacious living room, and his kitchen looks like a restaurant kitchen. We're just so excited to lounge around, watch his Apple TV and do all of our laundry for free.
JiJi Lee shares her story at Baltimore Theatre Project in Baltimore, MD in May 2025. Photo by Laurie DeWitt.
It's a Sunday afternoon. We go over with, like, four loads of laundry. We go through the door. I walk down the hall and I see in the living room that the waste basket is on its side. I think, “Huh, that's weird.” I don't remember it being like that before because his house is super tidy, very beautiful.
I asked my husband, "Did you accidentally knock that over the last time you were here?"
And he's like, "Uh, yeah, probably." He's not even paying attention. He's already started on the laundry.
So, I walk through the house. I watch a lot of murder mystery shows and I know when something is off. I'm like CSI-ing it and I'm noticing these little things, like the drawers are open. I see documents and magazines scattered on the ground. My first thought is, “Oh, my God, somebody broke in.” But we disabled the alarm and none of the valuables were taken. But I just cannot shake this feeling that someone was in the house.
Then my husband calls me from the kitchen, “What are all these little cloves doing all over the counter?”
And I go and he is holding this little brown pellet. And, like a good detective, we Google Image it and in his hand he is holding a piece of squirrel poop. His reaction is to just casually flick it into the garbage.
I should mention my husband was an Eagle Scout, so he's very calm, very collected. One of his favorite sayings is, “Measure twice, cut once.” I think I got that right. I didn't check it. And my favorite saying is, “I feel really overwhelmed right now,” and I am feeling really overwhelmed right now.
So, a squirrel has been in this house. According to the poop, it's been all over the kitchen counter. I'm just like, “Where else has it been? What kind of damage did it do?”
So we walk through the house, assess the situation. I'm walking into the dining room and I step on like a wooden chip. There's wooden chips all over the carpet. My husband figures out that the squirrel broke through the wooden blinds to try to escape through the window, but the window is glass.
That's when we both realize the squirrel is still in the house. The call is coming right inside the house. I was like, “Oh, my God, Oh, my God, Oh, my God.” How did it even get in, because every door is locked? Everything's locked. I did not see any signs of forced entry.
We go into the front part of the house where there's a non‑working fireplace. I think that, exactly, that's where it came through. It must have fallen through the chimney and gone in that way. And I learned that a squirrel uses its tail as a parachute so it could crash land anywhere.
JiJi Lee shares her story at Baltimore Theatre Project in Baltimore, MD in May 2025. Photo by Laurie DeWitt.
I'm looking in closer to the fireplace and then suddenly I hear, “Chi-chi-chi-chi-chi.” I was like, “Oh, my God, the squirrel is in there. The squirrel is in the fireplace.” Even my husband, the Eagle Scout, is like, “Oh, my God, the squirrel is in the fireplace!”
We do not know what to do. It's late on a Sunday. There's no pest control open. We are losing daylight and I'm imagining this squirrel is going to turn rabid as soon as it gets dark.
We're two former New Yorkers. We don't know what to do, but we are smart. We have street smarts.
So, we read a wikiHow article on how to get rid of the squirrel. We read this very scientific, peer‑reviewed wikiHow article and it says, “To get rid of the squirrel, leave one door or one window open and close off the rest of the house. This way, the squirrel has one point of egress.”
But there are two problems. One, all of the windows are painted shut. Two, our uncle has an open floor plan living room, so great for entertaining, not great for getting rid of a wild animal.
I'm like, “Okay, what do we do? What do we do?”
Then on top of that, I Googled and realized that a squirrel has very strong hind legs. They're double‑jointed. This article literally used the term acrobatic and so we could not let this squirrel loose or it's going to go all Cirque du Soleil all over the house.
Our uncle is coming home tomorrow. He's flying all the way from Europe. He's in his 70s. He's going to be really tired. And I think, “Maybe he won't notice. We could just leave and he'll never know.”
My husband is like, “No, we cannot leave a wild animal here for him to find.”
I think, “Okay. We need backup. We need backup.” So, we call the first person that we know who lives nearby. It's a family friend. He works for the IRS. I don't know, maybe he can audit the squirrel. To his credit, he shows up right away. He comes with oven mitts and a broom. He's like our suburban squirrel hitman.
And so we form a plan. The plan is we're going to leave the front door open and the men are going to open the grate to the fireplace. The hope is that the squirrel will run out and go through the front door.
My husband, the Eagle Scout, has constructed a wall out of cardboard boxes and placed them in the hallway so it'll block the squirrel from the living room.
We get into position. The men are in the front part with the fireplace. I'm standing behind the wall of cardboard boxes to offer moral support, but I do have a couch cushion that I can use as a shield just in case. I can't see what's going on but I can hear them. I hear my husband say, “On the count of three, we lift the grate. One, two, three.”
“Ah, oh, my God. Squirrel, squirrel!”
And I don't know what's going on. I just hear men screaming loudly and I hear like, “Squirrel under the couch.”
I'm like, “Oh, my God. It's going to be there all night.”
JiJi Lee shares her story at Baltimore Theatre Project in Baltimore, MD in May 2025. Photo by Laurie DeWitt.
And then the squirrel runs out into the hallway and we lock eyes. For a second, I think, “Oh, it's kind of cute,” but then the squirrel starts running towards me. I'm like, “Oh no.”
The squirrel stops and it leaps over the cardboard boxes and lands on my bare shoulder and clings onto me as if I am a tree.
I'm looking down at the squirrel like, "Ah!" And the squirrel is looking at me like, "Ah!" Then it jumps off of me, but instead of going for the door, the squirrel runs towards me again.
I'm like, “Oh, no.” So I take the couch cushion and I kind of aim it at its face. The squirrel freaks out. It runs out the door and flies over the front steps. I have never seen a squirrel fly like that before. It was working its hind legs.
And I was like, “Oh, my God.”
The men come over and they're like, “Wow, thanks for taking one for the team.”
And I was like, “I think I have rabies.” But, luckily, the squirrel successfully evacuated. No one was harmed except for me and my arm. I was just so excited to return to our rental apartment.
I am not a homeowner and I am fine with that. The next time something like this happens, I will gladly let my landlord take care of it.
Thank you.
Part 2
I was never really successful in an academic environment. Growing up, I thought I was going to go work for myself and make a million dollars, and forget college. Who needs any of that business?
So, I had a series of odd jobs. Worked in restaurants, ranches, moved dead bodies for funeral homes for a little while, before I went into banking. Then after banking for a few years, I started a construction company in Sun Valley, Idaho. I did that for a few years and found some level of success. I had 18 full‑time employees. We were working in Sun Valley, Boise, Twin Falls, and the Seattle area, but I wasn't really happy with the day‑to‑day of my life and the day‑to‑day of my job, or who I had to be to be a successful manager of laborers on a construction site.
Joshua Wilson shares his story at Boise State University in Boise, ID in April 2025. Photo by Sean Evans.
When the COVID lockdowns happen, my fiancee was living her best life, laying on the couch, wearing her pajamas, petting her cat all day long, and I was super jealous. Like, maybe there's something to this college thing.
I remembered when I was younger, I heard this story about a gentleman who was a custodian at an Ivy League school and used his benefits to pay for, essentially, a master's degree for free, for cleaning. It sounded great. I was like, “All right, I'm in.”
So, I used my background to secure a job here at Boise State as a facilities manager for student housing. We took care of 52 buildings across 14 communities, a little over 900,000 square feet of residential living space. And walking into that, I was 29 at the time and I had this giant imposter syndrome. Like, any minute now, they're going to figure out I don't know what the hell I'm doing.
I knew a few things. I knew that Boise State was pretty old, that we'd have some buildings that were a lot older than I was. And I knew that my predecessor and my boss's predecessor had both retired within a few weeks of each other after over 20 years at the university. There was a huge wealth of knowledge going out the door.
But I also kind of figured out that these guys in the last couple years of their career were a little complacent. That showed up later when I realized early on we were getting a lot of complaints about mold in student housing. I was talking to one of my maintenance guys about it, like, "Hey, what do we do when we have mold?" And they said, "Oh, we don't want to open that can of worms. Just send custodial to clean it up. If they think it's a problem, they'll call us and we'll have Elvis paint over it or something."
I thought that was weird. And so, I started talking to the rest of the maintenance team about what's the normal procedure for dealing with mold here on campus and everything varied. Nobody had any formal training. It was all word of mouth, all things that they had heard from other guys on the job site. But one thing was really clear and really consistent. That the old management had told them, "If you're cutting into a wall to repair a pipe and you just find it full of mold, close it up. Don't tell anybody. Go home. We don't want to open this can of worms.”
Now, I'm not an expert on mold, but I've never heard of a time that ignoring it was the right decision. So, I'm a little freaked out, man. I'm already worried about this giant job and now I'm worried about poisoning people.
So, I talked to my boss about what I was finding and she was wise enough to loop in the rest of Housing and Residential Life leadership. We sent out this email that was essentially like, “There's mold everywhere. We don't know what to do. We don't have the tools. Please help, oh, God.”
The director put me in contact with some of our campus partners who've dealt with mold before. They introduced me in turn to an industrial hygienist who has years of experience writing remediation protocol for mold removal, all sorts of other nasty things that we deal with on campus or we can deal with in an industrial environment.
She taught me three things. A lot more, but three really important things. First, any kind of mold needs three factors to thrive. It needs light - well, no light, lack of light, - moisture and temperature.
The Boise River, for example, flows all along campus, is the perfect environment for mold growth. There's endless bio matter, there's shade and there's moisture. She taught me this one, a little freaked me out at first. There's mold everywhere. There's thousands of spores of mold in the air we're breathing right now. They cause little to no health concerns. There's only a few species of mold that have been linked to long‑term respiratory issues.
Joshua Wilson shares his story at Boise State University in Boise, ID in April 2025. Photo by Sean Evans.
The third thing I learned, I'm not really supposed to call it mold until after it's been tested and we know that it's mold and not mildew. I don't know what the difference is, but she had a master's degree, so.
But we were armed with this bit of information. I started putting a few things together. I knew that we had these really old buildings with galvanized pipe. Now, if you don't know what galvanized pipe is, before the 1970s, it was this really cheap and durable product. Everybody loved it. It's a long steel pipe that's dipped in a bath of zinc meant to help protect it. I don't know.
What we didn't know at the time and when we were using this is that as water flows through the pipe, it interacts with the different electrical properties of the two different metals and causes something called electrolysis, where small electrical currents flow through the pipe. This causes rapid deterioration. You get rust really fast. Eventually, it scabs. You get this giant pipe, tons of scabs all over it. Super brittle, like if a roach walks over it, it's going to cause a pinhole leak.
And then in other cases, we'd have these giant drain lines going from floor to floor. I mean, no joke, cracks in them 10 feet long in a sewer drain. So, just human waste getting dumped into these mechanical spaces, which brings me to my next point what is mechanical space, or chase.
If you imagine any apartment building or res hall you've ever been in, usually, bathrooms are stacked right on top of each other. This allows, instead of you to have a bunch of different plumbing runs on every floor, you can have one solid or one shallow mechanical chase. Runs from basement to ceiling or basement to top floor that all the bathrooms can tap into.
Now, Morrison, Driscoll, Chaffee, Village, Heights, we have seven buildings that were built before 1974 and I started thinking about all these mechanical spaces filling up with all this water. I'm worried. I'm just trying to be a student and do a job so I can go to school and now I'm worried a mouse is going to fart on a pipe and cause this giant water catastrophe. We're going to find mold.
And so I worked with my boss and we created a three‑step process. The first step was really education. Most of the mold being reported on campus wasn't really mold. It was just like a student hadn't cleaned their shower in six months and it started turning funny colors and they didn't know why. So we had provided some education on airflow, like, "Hey, turn your fart fan on when you're in the shower. If it's wet, don't turn the light off and shut the door.” Little things like that.
Then we provided training for our staff. We hired a third‑party company to come in and provide training so that our staff could properly dry out a leak when there was a water loss, the intent being that if we can control the moisture, we can control the mold growth that happens later. That worked out really well.
The second step of our plan was something. Education, hiring contractors, yeah. My team was incredibly overworked. I had eight guys, each of them were closing over 1,000 work orders per year. They didn't have time to take on any more mold remediation projects, so we decided to bring in a third‑party company who was licensed and certified in mold remediation to handle these in the case where we responded to a mold report and found that it was actually some kind of mold.
The third thing we wanted to do was attack the root cause of the problem, replacing all the galvanized pipe on campus. Now, I thought that wouldn't be that hard, but, apparently, multi‑million dollar projects on university campuses are a little complicated. It took us a year to get buy‑in from the university and then another year to get buy‑in from the State Board of Education due to the project size. It was really a long process.
Maybe six, seven months into this, my boss got really frustrated with the toxic work environment and decided to leave. So while we were searching for her replacement, there was a kind of crisis broke out at Towers Hall. A student reported that they had mold and when we showed up we didn't find a little mold. We found imagine a shag carpet on every wall in your bathroom just mold. It wasn't weaving but I like to think it was. Just gnarly.
So we moved the students out, we contained the area. And during pre‑demolition testing, we found another concern was asbestos. This triggered some EPA regulations. Anytime there's asbestos, you have to give the EPA 10 days notice that you're going to do demolition. And on the furthest entrance to the affected area, you have to post these signs that say, "Danger. Asbestos. Proper PPE must be worn."
And we knew the students would love that. That wasn't going to freak them out at all. My director at the time acted out of an abundance of caution. We held a community meeting where we invited all the students who lived at Towers Hall to come talk to us. They were able to meet with me, the industrial hygienist, Luke, our director, and the contractors that were performing the work and ask whatever questions they had. We were able to explain, "Hey, asbestos, no big deal. Just don't breathe it." They were happy, we were happy. We did the work, went home and moved on.
Now, about a year later, we had a similar report at Chaffee Hall. A student reported mold, we found a lot of mold and some other work that needed to be done as well while we were there. But at this time, I had a new supervisor and a new director. They decided not to follow our pre‑existing process and procedure. They kind of wanted to reinvent the wheel at the time and this caused a delay in some of the work being done. That gave students an opportunity to talk to each other in common areas and I think some misinformation started to spread.
Joshua Wilson shares his story at Boise State University in Boise, ID in April 2025. Photo by Sean Evans.
Then misinformation made its way to parent groups on social media and they, you know, just this, “They're poisoning our kids. What are we going to do?” It really culminated when one parent was walking around campus taking pictures of discolored window caulking and then sending it to everybody like, “I'm going to sue you.” They're threatening us with legal action.
It got to be really frustrating for me again to be working on whatever normal preventative maintenance needs to be coordinated around here, but I also have to work on the mold. I'm also a parent and I'm trying to be a student. And now I got to tell Chicken Little the sky is not falling.
It was a frustrating, high‑stress environment. I learned that facilities management is not my jam. I don't love this.
I had a few takeaways from that. One, mold is a really manageable problem, and asbestos, for that matter, when dealt with scientifically and with the process. Unfortunately, misinformation and fear drive a lot of decision making in university and personal lives.
The second thing I learned, it takes a lot longer to affect change at a university than what I was happy with initially. We all know this needs to happen. What are we doing? That's okay, because I quit. Now, I'm a full‑time computer science student, very much looking forward to applying my efforts in an industry that focuses on innovation and not just crisis control.